Desktop IRC App Smuxi Tweaks Layout, Adds Scripting Support

With Christmas being a time for the coming together of friends and family it’s an apt time for Smuxi, the popular cross-platform desktop IRC client, to push out a new release.

Because, while your Aunty Flo or Uncle Cyril might not be IRC aficionados, there’s a good chance that some of your closest online contacts were made through IRC.

Smuxi remains one of my favourite applications on Linux because – as I often like to drone on about – it does one thing and does it extremely well. That, and it has a stable development effort behind it. In an age where promising applications all-too-often sprout one month and wilt the next it’s something to be applauded.

Sentimental introduction aside, let’s look at what’s new in this release for Linux users:

The Twitter experience in Smuxi also gains a number of key improvements in this release, including new commands – /search, /retweet, /reply, /timeline, /follow and /unfollow – and a simple Twitter context menu when right-clicking on a user name.

Likewise, the XMPP beta implementation has also been tweaked to add:

See when contact is typing

Multi-user chat reconnection

Ability to Find Group Chats on own server

Encryption connection improvements

Getting Smuxi 0.10

Like a bulging stocking at the end of the bed the Smuxi PPA is stuffed full of pre-prepared builds for Ubuntu. The PPA supports 10.04 and 12.04 LTS through 13.10.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:meebey/ppa

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install smuxi

For more information on Smuxi you can head over to the official project website.